“Yes,” Vance answered without hesitation. “But it had to be done to keep order.”
I could tell where the conversation was going and I didn’t want to give Kendra the opportunity to go there. Her sister, just like my mother, had been killed by the US government. Not by nukes like so many others, but by gunfire in the face of a potential riot.
“So tell me about these Black Spots,” I said. “We passed the one you mentioned to us on the CB. What the hell was that?”
“A loaded question is what that is,” Greenbriar said nervously.
“Hell,” Watts said. He was, for once, not staring at Kendra. The mention of the Black Spots now had him looking at the floor. “I think they’re like Hell.”
“Sadly, we don’t know enough about them,” Vance said. “There was only a single verified report of one of them before everything came to an end and the military’s contact channels went down. It was somewhere near North Vietnam. What we do know is that whatever they are, they’re related to the creatures.”
Peterson let out a shaky laugh at his. “Creatures,” he scoffed. “Monsters is what they are.”
“Anyway,” Riley added, “we’ve all been referring to the Black Spots as nests. That’s sort of what we think they are. It’s almost like the mons—the creatures—made nests.”
“Yes,” Vance agreed. “And they were smart. They waited until after the world was mostly gone. We thought we had killed them all. Actually, I still believe we did. My own personal theory is that they did something to begin the creation of their nests when everything was happening—the bombs, the riots and everything.”
“I guess you guys must have missed out on the nests,” Hayes said. “We think they really started popping up over the last eight months or so. If you were lucky enough to be in a house and not wandering the roads, you were fortunate enough to never see one.”
“Or venture into one,” Greenbriar added.
“Crazy Mike is crazy for a reason,” Vance said, hitching a thumb towards the hall behind him. “He not only walked into one of the nests, but he saw what was in there and confronted it. Face to face.”
“What was it?” Kendra asked. She was holding the baby very tight now.
Vance shrugged. “His story varies. He says he saw monsters. He says he saw his wife, who died in the first barrage of nukes. He says he saw something that was too big to make sense of and he assumes it was one of the creatures. ”
“Was there ever any clear determination of what they are?” I asked. “The creatures, I mean. The monsters.”
“No,” Vance answered. “The scientists and whatever experts work on that type of thing almost all agreed that they came from some other dimension. Like a rip in the fabric of what we know as reality. Some said maybe there was an anomaly with the space-time continuum. Some blame CERN and that Large Hadron Collider thing. No one knows for sure.”
“These nests,” Kendra said, her voice quiet. “Can the creatures get to you if you stay away from them?”
“As far as we know, no,” Peterson said. “I passed by two of them before Vance found me. Other than being scary as hell, I don’t think the nests can hurt you.”
“Unless you go inside,” Watts said.
“I was walking with a woman for a while,” Greenbriar said. “We passed by one just outside of Ohio. She swore she heard her daughter in there, even though she knew that her daughter had died in one of those really bad riots. She went running into it and less than a minute later I heard her screaming. And there was something like thunder, like a deep rumbling from the earth.”
“Crazy Mike reported that same thing, too,” Riley said.
“Jesus,” Kendra said.
I thought about the outskirts of the nest we had seen and did not find it hard to believe that such horrors might exist inside of it.
“For now, that’s all we know,” Vance said. “I have some equipment that I managed to acquire during the last assault on the creatures. Very basic stuff. Video equipment, telecom stuff, bits and pieces of technology like the stuff we used to place the tracking device on the car you took. I plan to find out what the nests are exactly.”
“What would be the point?” I asked. “Seems like they’re pretty dangerous.”
The look on his face after I asked the question made me know that if he’ had any sort of respect for me upon meeting me, it was gone. He looked almost irritated when he answered. At the table, Greenbriar and Hayes in particular looked uncomfortable.
“It is dangerous,” Vance said. “But if we’re going to try to live in this world from now on, we need to know what else we’re sharing it with. The nests weren’t here before we set off the first nukes. But afterwards, they were miraculously here. It’s something new, violent, and unknown. So yes, I think it’s best that we know what they are.”
“And what’s in there,” Riley added.
It struck me then just how badly Riley wished to be in Vance’s position. He wanted to be the man in charge—the man with the military background.
“How?” I asked. “Is there a plan or something?” I tried my best to keep the fear and doubt out of my voice. In fact, I had no idea why I couldn’t just shut up.
“I’m not sure just yet,” Vance said.
Behind him, Greenbriar visibly shifted in his seat. I also noticed that Jeremy Watts was once again staring at the floor. For reasons I could not quite explain, I took this all to mean that Vance was lying to us and that everyone at the table knew it.
Kendra apparently picked up on it, too. She began to gently bounce the baby, as if he needed the extra comfort. “I hate to seem rude,” she said, “but is there a room I could use? I need to nurse the baby.”
“Of course,” Riley said. “I put your bags in the second to last room down the hall. There’s a small cot in there and a few blankets.”
“Thanks so much,” she said.
“Yes, thank you all,” I said.
“No problem,” Vance said. “If you need anything just let me know. We usually all meet out here together for a brief dinner. Feel free to join us.”
“Absolutely,” I said, giving a wave and walking behind Kendra.
The moment I turned my back on them and started down the hallway, I felt their eyes at my back. There was nothing warm or inviting about the sensation I felt crawl up my spine.
16
“He’s lying about something,” I said after we were in the room with the door closed.
“I know,” Kendra said. “But what?”
“I don’t know.”
The room was small and made me regret ever leaving the Dunn’s house. Even walking down the hallway to get to the room, the place felt too closed in. I tried my best not to let my distrust of every other living person take control of my thoughts, but I couldn’t help it. These feelings made the entire little structure they had found here beneath the parking garage feel like a tomb that had gone uncovered for millions of years.
From what I could gather from the little bit of the hideout we had seen, the tiny complex had once been some sort of collection of offices. It was yet another thought that made me feel like a ghost, haunting a world that I barely remembered—a world that had moved on to some other place without me.
Kendra’s ruse turned out not to be completely dishonest. The baby was hungry when offered her breast. He nursed for a few minutes before falling to sleep in mid-suck. Kendra swaddled him in one of our blankets and lay him down on the cot, using the one single pillow Vance and his people had provided as a buffer so he would not fall onto the floor.
“Do you think we should leave?” Kendra said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s something to consider. It’s not like we’d be hurting their feelings or anything. I think, all things considered, they’d understand the eat-and-run mentality.”
“That one guy kept staring at me,” Kendra said. “The bigger one.”
“Watts. I know. I noticed.”
I started looking through our ba
gs, through our meager belongings, making sure nothing had been taken.
“It sounds stupid, but I don’t feel safe here,” Kendra said. “Vance is lying about something and he’s either very bad at lying or just doesn’t care enough to try hard.”
“What do you think about his idea of trying to find out more about those nests?”
“I don’t want to think about that,” she said. “God, why did we ever leave our house?”
“For this,” I told her, pulling the photo of the gate and the slip of paper we had found on David Giuilano.
She looked to the picture of the gate longingly and then gently plucked it from my fingers. She smiled sleepily at the picture and then handed it back to me.
“Why do you think someone took a picture of it?” she asked.
“I’ve been wondering about that myself. I would think it would be to get the picture out around survivors—to let them know that they do exist. That way, survivors know there is at least one place they can go for safety.”
“That’s a nice thought,” she said. “If not a little naïve.”
“So what do you want to do about our current predicament?” I asked.
I felt ourselves sliding into a conversational style that we often delved into without fully realizing it. It was almost childlike. I liked to think of it as the playful sort of dialogue that was shared between awkward teenagers on a third or fourth date.
“I think we should at least stay for dinner. Maybe then we’ll tell them that we just don’t think this place is for us. Do you think that’s okay?”
“I’m good with that,” I said.
Although I had never told her, I very subtly crafted my responses and questions to her in a way that had her making most of the decisions. I did this on purpose. She had a better head on her shoulders than I did. She had been through much more in the aftermath of the bombs and the creatures and tended to make better decisions than I did. It had been her that had wished to stay at the Dunn’s house when we had come across it. I had wanted to keep walking the roads, looking for something better.
Now to find out that we could have easily come across one of the nests had we gone with my plan, she seemed smarter still.
There was a blanket folded to the end of the bed which she took off and spread out on the floor. She lay down on it, using her hand as a pillow. She looked over to me and gave me a come-here nod. She did this on occasion, especially when she was worried about something. I went to her and spooned her in a way that was mostly innocent. I was a device and nothing more; something to make her feel comfortable.
And that was fine with me. Still, every now and then, on those longer nights in the Dunn house, I’d had to break away early. I had not wanted her ever to sense the stirring below my waist.
I placed my right arm around her and felt her relax at my touch.
“Not too bad for two out, huh?” she asked. “We’ve already stumbled across military personnel and got lots of answers we’d been looking for.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not bad.”
“You know…the Safe Zone,” she said. “It would be best for the baby, too. I think it’s his best shot at a normal life. If we stay here with these people, there’s no certainty.”
“I know.”
But I couldn’t help but wonder just how much easier things were now that we knew more about the world. To me, it seemed like a better deal to be living all alone in the Dunn house, ignorant of these new problems and this new darkness on the face of the world.
With my arm draped across her, I thought of Watts. I wondered where he was within this little office complex and what sorts of things he might do to Kendra if given five minutes alone with her.
That thought stirred a protective anger in me that I had not felt since helping to birth Kendra’s baby. I kept it close to my heart as she dozed off. While she slept, I held her the whole time and kept my eyes on the door.
I eventually nodded off, too.
I dreamed of Ma and the day she died. It was a recurring dream that was really just a cruel recollection of that terrible day.
In the dream, it all unspools like some abstract film. New York was under evacuation so I drove to Ma’s house and helped her pack. She was basically helpless, sick, and weakened by the chemo she was undergoing for her breast cancer. We packed only her necessities and I wheeled her out into the chaotic streets, fighting her ancient wheelchair every step of the way.
When I had her in the car, we’d made it only three blocks before traffic became too clogged to move. Then the gunfire had started somewhere up ahead. I also noticed the helicopters circling overhead. Somewhere towards Central Park, something had exploded.
In the end, it was the wheelchair that had been the end of her. I could have afforded to get her a nicer one after the doctors told me she’d be in a weakened state. But I had put it at the end of my priorities list. A new wheelchair had been the last thing on my mind and that was why I had rushed through screaming crowds for twelve blocks, heading towards the buses the military had swarming in and out of New York City in an effort to help with the evacuation.
Someone came pinwheeling around the corner, half falling and half running, colliding with the wheelchair and knocking Ma to the street. I screamed after them but didn’t even have time to get the curse out before I watched the military Jeep come barreling through two cars, sparks flying from the metal-on-metal friction. The Jeep plastered two pedestrians, one thrown back into a cab, shattering the windshield. It then clipped the man that had just knocked Ma over and after that, it kept coming.
Ma looked up, confused, and the Jeep still did not stop. I moved, but not quickly enough. And in the dream, the end is always the same and it’s not too dissimilar to the dream people have where they feel like they are falling.
I never make it to her in the dream because I didn’t make it to her in time on that day, only sixteen hours before most of New York City had been wiped from the earth by a nuke. I see her caught under the wheel and, unable to stop it, I wish that the enormous and unspeakable creature that the news reported was less than thirty miles away from the city would hurry the hell up and crush us all.
17
A knock at the door woke us up sometime later. My watch indicated that we had been napping for a little more than an hour.
The knock came again, quiet and polite.
“Yeah?” I said.
“We’re having our dinner in about ten minutes if you’d like to join us,” Riley’s voice answered from the other side of the door.
“Okay. Thanks.”
I rolled over onto my back and looked to the ceiling. Kendra rolled over to face me and when she placed her hand on my chest, my heart started racing.
“Are we still telling them that we’re not staying?” she asked.
“I’d like to,” I said. “It’s weird—the idea of company is sort of exciting but…I don’t know…there’s something off about these guys. Don’t you think?”
“Definitely.”
I turned my head to look at her and our eyes locked. We looked at each other that way for at least ten seconds and it felt like a fire was scorching my mouth. That’s how badly I wanted to kiss her. So far, neither of us had attempted it. It would have been me to try it, for sure. Her disinterest in me for anything other than companionship was evident in a way that I can’t quite describe.
Above us, on the cot against the wall, the baby started to make tiny crying noises.
“I’ve got to find a restroom,” I said. “I’ll take the baby and check his diaper.”
Kendra nodded as she sat up and stretched her back.
I picked up the baby, still half asleep and rolling his tiny head along my shoulder. I opened the door to find someone that could direct me to where I could take a leak and nearly jumped back into the room right away. The man sitting along the wall directly in front of our door startled me so badly that I was slightly embarrassed.
He was a black man, dressed in a tattered shir
t and filthy camo pants. He looked up to me with wild eyes, their whites almost opal. Since I had never seen him before, I assumed his identity and he smiled when I spoke it.
“Mike?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said through the smile. “Craaazy Mike,” he added, to place emphasis.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. I wondered how long he had been sitting there.
“Yeah, likewise.”
A strange silence fell between us as Kendra stepped up behind me. Mike pulled at the scraggly beard on his chin and eyed us suspiciously.
“That’s a beautiful little baby,” Mike said.
His words ran together like syrup from a jug. I saw that his bottom lip had been badly injured. The more I looked at his face, the more apparent it became that he had suffered some sort of radiation poisoning within the last year. It was common, given the number of nukes that had been detonated on US soil.
“Thanks,” I said. “I need to get his diaper changed. I need to use the toilet, too. Is there a restroom or something?”
“Two doors past the pantry, where all the food is,” Mike said.
“Thanks.”
I sensed Kendra stepping out behind me, not wanting to be left alone with Mike. Whether he was legitimately crazy was debatable, but he sure did appear to be zoned out.
“You know,” Mike said, after we had put a few feet between him, “I won’t be here tomorrow, nope. They gonna make me go in there. In that damn dark place.”
We both turned. Even the baby seemed interested in what Mike had to say. Mike sat there, not bothering to look at us. He stared straight ahead, at our partially open door.
“What place?” Kara asked. And God, how I wish she hadn’t.
“In one of the Black Spots. One of the nests. Those damned things… sprinkled along the roads like poison in a candy dish.”
I knew right away that Kendra was going to carry the conversation out. She looked appalled that Mike had so passively accepted his fate—whether it was legitimate or not.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 6
